by Frank Bidart
don’t worry I know you’re dead
but tonight
turn your face again
toward me
when I hear your voice there is now
no direction in which to turn
I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and
but tonight
turn your face again
toward me
see upon my shoulders is the yoke
that is not a yoke
don’t worry I know you’re dead
but tonight
turn your face again
*****
from Desire by Frank Bidart. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux 1999.
On Tuesday, March 25 at 5:00 p.m., Bidart will be reading from his new collection of poems, Watching the Spring Festival, at Labyrinth Books in Princeton. This event is proudly sponsored by the Bain Swiggett Fund (Princeton University Department of English), Poetry@Princeton, and Labyrinth.
Jeff Dolven Writes:
“The Yoke” sounds like Frank Bidart. Or maybe first, it looks like him, even before you’ve auditioned the words: italics, gaps for pauses, skipped lines, and sharp enjambments all mark the page as his. The reading that that these devices score is both halting and urgent, and it should sound like someone trying hard to understand something difficult, and to make it understood. Bidart’s typographical resourcefulness always seems to be born of a fear that you won’t get what he is saying. (And because the subjects that compel him are often so discomfiting, maybe a fear that you won’t want to get it, that you’ll try not to.)
One way into the poem then is through this typography. It’s clear enough what “The Yoke” is about: wanting to see the face of a dead friend again. But it seems to have two voices, one in italics, one not, both of them revolving the same phrases. Perhaps they capture the longest line’s alternation of sleeping and waking and sleeping and waking: the repeated request, “turn your face again” (toward me, at least at first), can’t be shaken in either state. You can’t wake up from it, or sleep it off. Of perhaps they actually distinguish the words of two different speakers—each thinking that the other is dead? Both dead? And what does “dead” mean here—literally dead; dead to me?
And then there is that curious opening, “don’t worry.” As though the dead might be wearied by our impossible demands to see them again; or pained at how we must be suffering when we ask again and again. The poem’s economy in opening up our confusion in the face of loss, whatever kind of loss this is, wherever it resides, is remarkable.
Sorry this is late; I just stumbled onto this comment. Pound most definitely did compose on a typewriter — Hugh Kenner has an essay about this, in fact, called “Pound Typing.”
I think a lot could (and has) been said about the effects of the printing press/popular media on the look of Modernism; but it’s kind of interesting to think that the internet, despite being more or less synonymous with “modern” nowadays, might actually discourage the sort of spatial play that’s become such a hallmark of postmodernist developments like Language poetry. It’s definitely occurred to me that, what with blogs, e-mail, text messages, Tumblrs, etc., people are more prose-oriented than they’ve been in a long time, even if that prose typically comes in very small portions. Maybe poetry will stop being so geared to the physical book or journal page, and be geared more to the scrollable column, or the comments box? Might this augur the return of (a certain kind of) informational content over spatial form?
It’s interesting that Jeff focuses here on “Bidart’s typographical resourcefulness” since that very facet of his work came into relief for me while posting “The Yoke” to this website. The blogging software (and, as I understand it from people more tech-savvy than I, html code in general) doesn’t like “typographical resourcefulness”–especially indentations of any kind. To enter a “tab” mid-line requires the manual entrance of five spaces using the code “ .” In short, the internet does not love poetry–which is, among other things, a reminder to me that sometimes it’s important, discovering a poem I love online, to go back to the paper version, too.
During the wonderful seminar Bidart offered here last week, a discussion of the importance of space in one of Pound’s cantos got me thinking, then, about the technology of space, and even the economy of it. Jeff raised this issue, too, with his question about whether Pound composed on a typewriter. I’m wondering not only about the composition but the publication process. Is it possible that New Directions (and, even more likely, conventional anthologies reprinting the “bad” version of the canto) might choose one (less spacious) version of a poem over another in order to economize? I don’t mean simply to gripe about technology, but to wonder out loud about both what kind of limits it imposes and what kind of discoveries and and resourcefulness it enables for the poetic imagination.